Being Superficial

… keeps you from being REAL.

Superficiality keeps you on the surface of your life. It prevents you from going deeper emotionally. It keeps you from establishing deeper connections in your relationships with others and subsequently with yourself.

Being superficial is a way of guarding yourself against intimacy, vulnerability and emotional pain. After all, if you never go deeply, how deeply can you get hurt?

Superficial relationships are easy — they require nothing more than pleasantries and social graces. But superficial relationships are never fulfilling; they don’t feed and nurture the soul. They leave you feeling vacant and empty. They are never deep enough to penetrate the heart, so they never evolve you. They are just predicated on ego interests (conditional love, physical attraction, sex, money, status, education, career, labels, etc…).

Real relationships transform you — they change you, they force you to grow, they breathe life into you and make you real. They require emotional depth and vulnerability. They force you to go deeper into yourself and unlock your demons. Ultimately they break your heart open so you can hold more love. They make you better. But to get there you have to first penetrate the realm of the heart (unconditional love, selflessness, acceptance, non-judgment, openness, vulnerability, etc…).

Superficial relationships are easy, but anything just handed to you is NEVER worth having. Real relationships are more challenging, they push you outside your comfort zone, they force you to face those demons and go deeper into yourself and your relations with others.

Superficiality isn’t just about being fake or shallow, it’s about guarding yourself from pain and hurt. Are you ready to do the work to be in a real relationship or are you contented to accept what’s on the surface? When you are ready to go deeper, you will unearth the real treasures that await you.

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Putting Up Walls

… keeps you alone.

It doesn’t keep you safe.

When we are fearful, we put up walls. We put up walls to protect ourselves from being hurt – from being judged – from being misunderstood – from being “found out,” etc… Our walls are personas that we create for ourselves and we hide behind them. Sometimes we stay behind them for so long that we forget who we really are behind those walls.

We put walls in place to “protect” ourselves but ironically it does the opposite – it distances us from real connections with others. But in life, you only know who you are in relationship to another human being, so if you are hiding behind a wall, you are not helping yourself to grow and evolve.

Walls keeps us “walled off” from being who we really are because the wall demands that our focus is on the facade, not any deeper. When you define yourself by your wall, it can give you an appearance of not being real, lacking depth or appearing fake and superficial, an “empty shell,” etc…

If you want to be in a real relationship, you have to take your wall down and invite someone into your castle. Taking your wall down demands that you can be vulnerable, genuine and REAL with yourself. Why is it important to be all that? Because the pain of being vulnerable is NOTHING compared to the pain of losing yourself to a wall.

Walls don’t protect you, they keep you locked in a prison of your own creation. Let your guard down and let the walls come down, let the sunshine in. Nobody loves a wall, but they can love the beautiful being inside the wall. If you want to be in a real relationship, let someone into your castle, take down your wall so you can have a true connection. When others see you for who you really are, not the wall you have put up, you become REAL.

Read more inspiration in Donnalynn’s new Book, “Life Lessons,” click here.

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